CEO Denny Schleper takes all types of questions from our CLA team in Northern California’s Walnut Creek office. Hear about his time in San Francisco, his thoughts on CLA’s Global outlook and even learn about his favorite movie and why.

[00:00:05]

announcer: Welcome to “Own the Promise,” a CLA podcast created to share what guides every decision we make and every relationship we cultivate.

Denny: Hello, CLA family. This is Denny Schleper once again coming to you with my monthly podcast, and I’ve had the opportunity to visit a lot of offices, as many of you know, and today I have the pleasure to be out in the Walnut Creek area.

[00:00:36]

It’s a wonderful, beautiful office. We have around 27, 30 people in this location. Just a little bit about the office itself, through September, the revenue for this office is sitting at around $6 million of revenue, and the expectation is that we’ll finish the year probably around 7 1/2 million.

[00:00:56]

The really wonderful thing is through September, that $6 million of revenue is putting the office a million dollars-plus over budget for the year, so that’s obviously fantastic news, and a lot of growth, and I think I heard that growth compared to last year is sitting at around 20% growth for the location, so on my behalf and for all of the people at CLA, congratulations to the office.

[00:01:23]

Thank you for all of the efforts that you’ve put in, especially as most of you know as part of the CLA family, this office has only been with the firm for the last 11 months, and so that means they’ve produce that growth percentage and that over budget amount in a time of terrific transition, but when I look across the room and the faces, it looks like everybody still stayed healthy and are still smiling, so we wanted to thank them for their efforts as well.

[00:01:50]

We also just wanted to open it up to questions they might have or anything that might help us continue to move the firm forward, the CLA promise forward, not only in the what we do, which that is we help our clients, and not only the how, and that is by getting to know them extremely well and building relationships, but probably the most critical piece, and that is the why, and that is to create opportunities both for our clients and for all of us here at CLA. So we’ll turn it over to Russ first.

Russ: Hey, Denny. Just since you’re visiting the Bay Area, just want to know what’s your favorite place to visit?

[00:02:30]

Denny: So, you know, many times what happens with my visits across the country is I do spend most of the time at offices or actually with the people or the leaders from those offices, so many times people ask me, “What have you done?” and the answer’s pretty boring, and that is, “I went from the airport here, and I went from here back to the airport.” However, this trip my wife and I came out last Saturday, so today being a Wednesday, it’s given us a few days to not only meet with offices but also to spend some free time in the Bay Area.

[00:03:05]

So what did we do? Probably my favorite thing was actually yesterday we visited Alcatraz, and what was really nice is I put my wife in the cell and just imagined. That wasn’t very nice. She got kind of weirded out though. She said the minute we got on the Rock, she said she felt this incredible weight come on her chest, and she just–she freaked out a little bit, so when I put her in the solitary confinement cell, that did not go so well, but we saw really tremendous part–amounts of the city.

[00:03:38]

We went on the big bus tour, actually, went across Golden Gate, did all those types of things, and I’m not a great person with heights. In fact, I’m horrible with heights. I’m okay on airplanes, but you put me on something like that,